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If you’re one of these people, I can relate. I’m a fan, too, and I couldn’t get a ticket in my hometown of Toronto. All six shows in November 2024 sold out within hours to those lucky enough to receive precious presale access codes. (An estimated 31 million people registered for a chance at just 300,000 seats—the odds: 400 to one.) The same goes for Swift’s three shows in Vancouver this December. So, our options are either to pay sky-high prices on reseller platforms or look for Eras Tour tickets in another city—maybe even another country. That’s what I did.
The costs of gig tripping
Unable to get an Eras Tour ticket at face value in Toronto, I risked buying one from Stubhub for the Buenos Aires show on Nov. 9, 2023. I’d always wanted to go to Buenos Aires, and Taylor Swift was the catalyst to make it happen.
I paid about $650 (USD$487.55,) for a single floor seat (which turned out to be standing room—there were no actual seats).
Was it a good deal? For one of Swift’s Toronto shows in November, my colleague got a 100-level seat at the Rogers Centre for $1,096.78 at cost from Ticketmaster—so I saved $446.78 on my ticket in Buenos Aires. The cheapest resale seat on Stubhub with a comparable view was priced at $3,888, which is six times (!) the cost of my Buenos Aires ticket. Together, the cost of concert admission plus my flight to Buenos Aires ($1,300) added up to $1,950—less than the cost of one 500-level resale ticket in Toronto ($2,509, as of late April).
Some travelling Swifties are also paying far less. Ryan Thomas Woods, the Canadian content creator behind travel blog Out with Ryan, went to shows in both Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. He bought a presale ticket for Sydney, where his seat in the bleachers cost $309.90. Months later, three days before Swift’s sold-out Melbourne show, local concert promoter Frontier announced a ticket release for seats with a partially obstructed view. Woods happened to be in town, so he took a calculated risk and bought a ticket. “I decided that I don’t care if I couldn’t even see her, as long as I could hear her, I would die happy,” he says.
The risk paid off. “They only had single tickets, so I secured one and didn’t even look where on the map it was,” says Woods. “Little did I know it would be three rows from the floor…so close!” The seat? C2. The total cost: $78.26. That’s $231.64 less than his Sydney bleacher seat.
Most affordable Eras Tour stops on StubHub
According to ticket reseller Stubhub, these are the five most affordable cities to see Taylor Swift for the rest of 2024, based on the average price of tickets recently sold on its platform. (All prices here are in U.S. dollars and are subject to change.)
- Warsaw, Poland: $473
- Hamburg, Germany: $546
- Gelsenkirchen, Germany: $556
- Munich, Germany: $583
- Vienna, Austria: $632
Where to buy Taylor Swift tickets in Europe?
After a two-month hiatus, the Eras Tour resumes in Europe in May 2024—with stops in France, Sweden, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Poland and Austria—before heading to the U.S. and Canada in October.
According to travel app Tripit, 40% of American music fans are planning a trip to see their favourite artist this year, an increase from 22% in 2023. Like I did, Swift superfans wanting to live out their wildest concert dreams might realize it could be cheaper to jet abroad to belt out “Cruel Summer” than to get a ticket in North America. Research from Skyscanner, a travel search aggregator, found that nearly half (49%) of Canadian music fans would consider gig tripping overseas this year if it would help them save money.
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